KDE proudly announces the immediate availability of Plasma 5.0, providing a visually updated core desktop experience that is easy to use and familiar to the user. Plasma 5.0 introduces a new major version of KDE's workspace offering. The new Breeze artwork concept introduces cleaner visuals and improved readability. Central work-flows have been streamlined, while well-known overarching interaction patterns are left intact. Plasma 5.0 improves support for high-DPI displays and ships a converged shell, able to switch between user experiences for different target devices. Changes under the hood include the migration to a new, fully hardware-accelerated graphics stack centered around an OpenGL(ES) scenegraph. Plasma is built using Qt 5 and Frameworks 5.

This is a pretty major release, and while the cosmetic stuff isn't all cleaned up yet, I like the new design direction the team is taking - not a huge departure from what came before, but they seem to be making it look a little less... KDE-ish, if that makes any sense.

I'll be waiting on a few point releases, but I definitely want to try this out. I've always been a fan of KDE - stumbles notwithstanding - because it puts a lot of control in the user's hands to shape the user interface into what she wants. That's a very rare thing to come by these days, and we should cherish it.

"Release Early and Release Often" is not exactly coming from any other world than the open source one ;-)

With the KDE 4.0 release we had the issue that everything was one big blob: the libraries, the desktop and the applications. Back then, the libraries and most of the applications were in good shape, the desktop was not. After more than a year, we really wanted the new and improved apps to get out and the desktop was basically workable so we decided to release. Code that is not in users hands rots away...

We all know how that went.

So, for the 5 series, we split it all up: Frameworks 5.0 (the new name of our modularized libraries) was released last week, the desktop comes now and the Applications still have to start moving to Qt5/Frameworks 5... We weren't forced to release half-baked stuff but everything came 'when done'.

KDE 4.0 release we had the issue that everything was one big blob: the libraries, the desktop and the applications

And expectations of smooth transitions, from KDE1->2->3 were tough precedents to live up to. There wasn't support for a user switching back & forth between 3 & 4, due to in place translation of config, from KDE3 settings. I responded to the pre-release call for testing, and it was very quickly clear to me, that with the relatively short time left till 4.0, that a train wreck was ahead. Furthermore that need to push out and release developers code meant NOONE could stop it.

Actually the "Release Early and Release Often" is sort of related to the "Worse is better!" idea, shipping a simple 50% implementation which spreads and then justifies later improvement. The old rule of thumb about waiting for version 3 of anything, is based on 1 & 2 not being properly finished products.

Well, 'KDE' 4.0 was a mess. Plasma was at best a developer preview, while the applications were mostly already in a very good shape. The libraries could already have been released before.

That is why we split it up this time: now, the libraries (Frameworks) and Plasma are released and the applications are coming in december. If we had kept it all one big blob, either the applications would now have been a mess or you all would have had to wait another 4-6 months...

"Release Early and Release Often" is not exactly coming from any other world than the open source one ;-)

Years ago, I worked at a university maintaining the installed applications for professors teaching in computer classrooms. One such application was AutoCAD. I forget which version, but it had only been out a few weeks when I installed it (their release schedule coincided with the academic calendar for once).

The instructor called me up, very unhappy-- It seems when he tried to add a door to a wall, AutoCAD would crash.

Searching AutoDesk's support site, this was a "known issue", and fixed in the first patch set, released one day after AutoCAD's launch.

Most modern MMO's also follow the concept of "release early, release often".

I honestly think that if people are paying you for your software, you ought to have better QA. In the FOSS world, we simply have no paid people to do QA, so at some point waiting to release something has no benefit. Rather, putting things out, even if not perfect, gets us not only testing but also patches and help. It is a healthy, smart thing to do for a FOSS community.

It is also why the comparisons sometimes drawn with Microsoft, Apple or Google (even Android) make no sense.